While
electronics companies around the world gathered at the 2007 Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Apple shook up the digital world
yesterday from hundreds of miles away in the Moscone Center Theater in
San Francisco.

Apple has just announced the release of their new $299 Apple TV, a home
theater device the company says allows users to wirelessly play iTunes
content from the Mac or PC on their widescreen televisions. This
service can be used for movies, TV shows, music, photos and podcasts.
Although the technical specs are not overwhelming, with a 40 GB hard
drive and no 1080p video, this marks the first major video device that
users can put into their home theater systems with the Apple logo on
it.

Using Apple TV’s interface, users can browse and view their entire
collection of digital media from across the room, using the Apple
remote. Apple TV connects to almost all modern widescreen television
sets. Proprietary video formats with resolutions ranging from 480i up
to 720p are supported, and the Apple TV unit can store 50 hours of
video, 9,000 songs and 25,000 photos.

Apple TV can be connected to a broad range of widescreen TVs and home
theater systems. It comes standard with HDMI, component video, analog
and optical audio ports. Using high-speed AirPort® 802.11 wireless
networking, Apple TV can auto-sync content from one computer or stream
content from up to five additional computers right to your TV without
any wires.

The integration of Apple TV and iTunes lets users choose from over 250
feature-length movies and 350 TV shows in near-DVD quality, along with
four million songs, 5,000 music videos, 100,000 podcasts and 20,000
audio books.

In
his keynote speech, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the audience that Apple
has introduced three revolutionary new products: a widescreen iPod with
touch controls, a cell phone and a revolutionary new Internet device.
As he kept repeating the phrase, “a revolutionary mobile phone, a
widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet
communications device” over and over, the crowd began to understand
that he actually wasn’t talking about three separate products. What he
was referring to is in fact one new device that could potentially do
away with smart phones, such as the Treo series and Motorola’s Q.

Featuring a 3.5-inch diagonal screen that supports widescreen movies, a
thickness of only 11.6 millimeters, a two-mega-pixel camera, a quad
band GSM+edge cell phone and Macintosh’s OS X operating system, this
new device has more features than any other smart phone and, from
watching the hands-on demo, the interface is extremely simple to use.

Shipping in June 2007, the phone will be exclusively on the Cingular
service and will be sold in Apple retail outlets including Apple.com
and the Apple stores, as well as Cingular.com and Cingular retail
stores. AT&T has recently acquired Cingular and, according to
Cingular, has the largest wireless network in the country, with the
fewest dropped calls.

In 2006 worldwide sales, MP3 players sold 135 million units. Personal
computers sold 209 million units, whereas cell phone sold over 930
million units. By tapping into this new market, Apple hopes to gain at
least 1% market share in the cell phone world, which would see them
selling about 10 million iPhone units in 2007.

To reflect the fact that their new products include the iPod and the
soon-to-be released iPhone, Apple Computer Inc. has dropped the word
“computer” from their name and are now known simply as Apple Inc.

After hearing this announcement, Cisco systems, the company that just
released the Linksys VoIP phone, announced they are the copyright
owners of the name iPhone. Rumor has it, however, that the two
companies are going to come to an agreement on the use of the name and
it should not delay the early summer launch of the Apple iPhone.

The iPhone will be in the $499 to $599 range, depending on the size of
the internal hard drive (4 GB or 8 GB). There may be discounts based on
two-year service deals with Cingular Wireless.